This page is the recommended starting point for every new user. It walks
through the entire journey once, in order. Every other page in this guide
goes deeper on one specific step — come back to them as you need more
detail.
Before you start
What you need
A login email and password from your workspace administrator. You
cannot sign yourself up — see Login for why.
What you don't need
No coding, no SEO certification, no separate software. Everything
happens in your web browser.
Step 1 — Log in
1
Go to your dashboard URL
Your administrator gives you a URL (for example
https://app.mael.in).
Open it — you’ll land on the Log in page.[SCREENSHOT NEEDED: Login page showing email and password fields]2
Enter your email and password
Type the credentials your administrator gave you, then click Log in.
3
Forgot your password?
Click Forgot password? right above the password field. See
Login → Password reset for
what happens next.
Step 2 — Land on your workspace
Where you land depends on your role:- Most users land on Overview (
/) — your personal mission control. - Platform administrators (role
super_admin) land on Clients instead, because Overview shows data for one workspace at a time, and an administrator hasn’t picked one yet.
A “workspace” in MAEL is called a tenant internally, and a client
in the dashboard’s own labels. If you’re a platform administrator
managing several clients, see
Initial Setup for how to create one and
switch into it. If you’re a regular team member, your workspace already
exists — skip to Step 3.
Step 3 — Make sure your website is set up
Before you can run any SEO workflow, MAEL needs to know which website you’re working on. In MAEL, a website is called a domain.- Go to Settings in the sidebar (bottom of the Manage section).
- You’ll see every domain already configured for your workspace.
- If the list is empty, or the domain you need isn’t there, a platform administrator needs to add it first — there’s no self-service “add domain” button on this page for a regular user. See Initial Setup for exactly who can add one and how.
Step 4 — Find your domain’s ID
This is the one genuinely technical step in this tutorial, and it’s worth knowing about upfront rather than getting stuck on it later. The easiest way to get it: ask whoever set up your domain (usually the platform administrator who added it — see Initial Setup) to send you the domain ID when they create it. If you’re the administrator yourself, see Initial Setup for where it’s returned. Once you’ve run at least one workflow that produced an article, you can also find the domain ID by opening that article in Content → Library and looking at its Domain field.Step 5 — Trigger your first workflow
1
Open the trigger dialog
From Overview, click Trigger workflow (top right) — or go to
Workflows in the sidebar and click the same button there. You can
also press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) and choose
Trigger a workflow.[SCREENSHOT NEEDED: Trigger workflow dialog with Workflow field and Inputs JSON textarea]
2
Choose a workflow
In the Workflow field, type or pick from the suggestions:We recommend
technical-audit for your very first run — it only
reads your site (crawls it and checks for issues), so there’s
nothing to accidentally publish. See
SEO Workflows → Technical SEO Audit
for full detail, or
SEO Workflows overview
for the other four workflows.3
Enter the inputs
In the Inputs (JSON, optional) box, paste:Replace
your-domain-id-here with the ID from Step 4. Keep the
quotation marks exactly as shown — this field expects valid JSON.4
Click Trigger run
You’ll see a confirmation toast, and the dialog closes. You’re taken to
the Workflows list, where your run appears — usually within a few
seconds.
Step 6 — Watch it run
Click your new run in the Workflows list to open its live detail page. [SCREENSHOT NEEDED: Workflow run detail page showing status badge, progress bar, and execution timeline] You’ll see, updating in real time:- A status badge (
running, then eventuallycompletedorfailed) - A progress bar (steps completed out of total)
- A Live connection indicator, confirming the page is streaming updates rather than showing stale data
- An execution timeline — one row per step, each with its own status as it happens
technical-audit run typically finishes in a few minutes. Full detail:
Monitor Your Workflow.
Step 7 — Read the results
Once the run shows completed, look at the stat strip at the top of the run page: Steps completed, Cost in USD, Tokens used, and Duration. The technical audit’s actual findings — crawl errors, Core Web Vitals scores, indexability issues — are what the workflow produced; see Understand Your Results for how to read scores and recommendations in general, and Technical SEO Audit for what this specific workflow’s output means.Step 8 — Try the content pipeline (optional, next)
Once you’re comfortable with the basics, the workflow most people actually came here for isfull-content-pipeline — research a keyword,
generate a full SEO article, and get it approved and published, all in
one run. It costs real AI spend and — once approved — publishes to your
live site, so it deserves its own careful walkthrough:
Run Your First SEO Workflow and
Full Content Pipeline.
Critically: nothing publishes without a human clicking Approve. Even
though the pipeline can run start to finish on its own, it always stops
and waits at the Approvals page before anything goes live. See
Take Action.
What’s next
Dashboard Overview
Learn every part of the screen you’re now looking at.
Understand Your Results
Scores, statuses, and what to do about each one.
Dashboard Features
A dedicated page for every feature in the dashboard.
Troubleshooting
Stuck somewhere? Start here.